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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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22 May 2004 - 12:40 pm
David, what have you been up to, where have you been?
Work seems to have taken over my life. The product that my team has been working on for the past year has a business requirement to be "high availability," which means that our product has to be insulated from all manner of hardware failures. What this means is that our product will be placed on a complex architecture with lots of redundancy. Then we will test all the failure scenarios that the engineers who designed this architecture can think of. We're willing to write off "in-flight transactions" but everything else has to operate seamlessly if a server, switch, site, or application server fails. This testing will take a great deal of time and before it begins we have to make some design changes to our app to get it into the HA environment. We're in the midst of designing the test cases for our app to go into HA, and I am my team's technical representative, so I've been spending a lot of time in meetings. The last (and only) app to have gone through this HA process has so far spent 20 months in testing and isn't yet finished. We're hoping that we can apply the lessons they learned and get our app in and out in eight months, although six would be a lot better. So this is a bit of a challenge all of itself. And then we have to throw into the mix the fact that our app underwent a fundamental design change a few weeks ago and isn't yet complete. HA testing starts June 1. (I'll believe it when I see it, though.) So work has been eating up nine or ten hours a day the past few weeks.
But what about when you're not at work?
Most of my time these days is devoted to packing up my stuff for all too imminent move to the new apartment that michael, Jim, and I found in Clayton. I've filled about ten boxes so far, but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. This next week, leading up to the move a week from Sunday, which I suspect will be a bit of a bear.
Anything else you want to mention?
Well, I wrote a book review that's been published in "The Rational Edge." Here's the link.
Posted by on 22 May 2004 at 12:40 PM
Comments
Nice article David!
Since we'll be neighbors I should have you all over for dinner sometime.
Posted by rkc on 22 May 2004 - 2:56 PM